Its All about Emotion

After reading chapters three and four of a "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas an American Slave" I realized that Douglas uses a lot of ethos and pathos and not much logos. Since this is a memoir, and it touches the horrific subject of slavery, he does not have to put much logic into it because what he wants us to know is how he felt while he was living this nightmare. It’s all about sentiment and imagining what was going on. 

Douglas uses ethos throughout the whole memoir. From the beginning, even before one starts reading, ethos is already present. The words slave and slaveholder, or black and white at that time already had a meaning, sort of character in society, and that is what ethos is. Unfortunately, at the time whites had an ethos of superiority towards blacks, a sort of power. Colored people were seen more as animals than human beings, and they were oppressed by society. This is seen throughout the whole book, but especially at times when Douglas starts describing for instance, the personality of a white man towards the slaves. For example, how “Mr. Gore spoke to command and commanded to be obeyed… When he whipped he seemed to do so from a sense of duty, and feared no consequences… He was a man of the most inflexible firmness and stone-like coolness. His savage barbarity was equaled only by the consummate coolness with which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves under his charge. (35) With that description of Mr. Grose’s character, the reader can picture how cruel and inhumane this man was towards the slaves, and how terrified the slaves must of felt with his presence. Or how Colonel Loyd was “known to own thousands of slaves” which makes the reader picture how white men were rich whereas the slaves had nothing. The feelings that both races had towards each other were all about ethos because those feelings were the reactions that they had towards their presence.

When someone is talking about slavery, normally a person's reaction is all about pathos, nothing else comes to mind. It was an event in history that is heart breaking and savage. It makes me feel sad and sick at the same time, there isn't much logic into it, it's all emotion. For instance when Douglas is talking about how “Mrs. Hicks… seized an oak stick of wood by the fireplace, and with it broke the girl’s nose and breastbone, and thus ended her life.” (37) Douglas wrote about this event so that the reader has a horrific perception of Mrs. Hicks, and the savage treatment that slaves received for just doing minor things like falling asleep. Douglas made it clear that white men and women were inhumane against colored people. With this passage Douglas accomplishes his goal of making the reader very sensible towards the slaves, and mad against the slaveholders.

Douglas uses a mixture of pathos and logos throughout the book. The examples stated above contain both of these rhetorical characteristics, and Douglas does this on purpose to make his memories come alive in our minds. So that we can picture and feel somewhat what he felt while he lived through this misery. After reading these two chapters, due to Douglas’s powerful descriptions I feel down with water in my eyes.